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I had written a story, and given a copy to a friend to read. She came to my house. I said to her, “What’d you think of the story? It’s crap isn’t it?” in the way designed to elicit the reaction, “Oh no, it’s great!” . Instead she said, “Yeah, it’s crap.”

Then I was standing in the kitchen, and there was a huge long line of coffee cups on the bench. Every coffee cup was different from every other: some were big clunky mugs, others were delicate china things on saucers. Each cup held a different quantity of coffee: some were spilling over, some contained nothing but dregs, and every gradation in between was represented in some cup. Some of the coffees were freshly brewed and piping hot, while others had clearly been made days ago and were perfectly cool.

I went along the line of cups, staring down into each one in turn. As I went, each coffee cup communicated to me one of my friend’s criticisms of my story.

The end.

Perhaps it was an overdose of iSnack 2.0 or something, but I had the strangest dream last night. And I remembered it, which is very unusual for me.

I was staying in a house. The house engendered an intense feeling of suspicion and paranoia in me for some reason. The floor of the house switched backwards and forwards between two states: in one state it was a normal concrete pad with a plain carpet on it, in the other state it consisted of rotten floorboards suspended over a dank pool of water which lapped at the floorboards.

Apart from the paranoia, the first clue that something was very wrong was a ripple that suddenly formed in the carpet. I traced the ripple, trying to figure out its significance. Suddenly the floor was the boards-over-water configuration, and I started noticing the heads of famous people in various places around the house, plonked down on the boards or floating in the water in gaps in the floorboards, clearly put there to spy on me. I went over and picked up one of these heads, and noticed that a long coiled black cable – a bit like the cable on a telephone handset only thicker – came out of the bottom of the head and vanished into the murky water. Clearly someone was using the eyes of the decapitated famous people to spy on me. There was no way I was going to put up with that, so I took out my trusty pocketknife and went around picking up the heads and severing the cables.

The end.

I had me a most excellent dream last night, inspired in no small part by the Thornspell Launch yesterday.

In the dream, the new Lord of the Rings book was finally out, and so I scurried in gleeful anticipation to Whitcoulls. I walked up to the serving counter and squatted down. There beneath the counter was a cabinet with a big metal door like they have on the front of the corpse fridges in TV crime shows. I opened the door, and there was a big stack of hardback editions of the new book. I took four of them out and placed them on the counter. The disinterested weasel of a man behind the counter took my money (for some reason I was paying for one copy in cash but the other three with my credit card) and gave me my receipt. I put the books in my bag and scurried off.

Before leaving the store I decided to take a look at my new possessions, so I put my bag down, opened it, and hauled out the books. For some reason they weren’t hardbacks at all, but paperbacks. And the spines were all split and broken. Confused, I took the books back to the counter. The man assured me that I had in fact bought paperbacks, and that if I wanted hardbacks I would have to pay an extra $27. Still confused, I handed over the money and got a receipt, plus the free gift that came with buying the hardback edition – a puppy in a plastic shopping bag. I was nonplussed, but I figured that a puppy’s a puppy, so I took the bag. The puppy spent most of the rest of the dream clutched to my chest, perfectly well-behaved and perfectly happy to just sit in his plastic shopping bag and look out at the world.

I crouched down again to open the book cabinet, but now it really was a fridge, containing stacks of cold square things that weren’t books. I asked the weasel where my books were, and he just shrugged and went back to doing something more important. So I wandered around the shop, looking high and low for my books. I couldn’t find them anywhere, not even in the tall square stone defensive tower that soared above the shop.

Annoyed, I went back to the weasel and asked for my money back. He paid without demur, but insisted I give the puppy back, which aggrieved me greatly.

Still wondering where my books went, I left the store. Immediately outside was a wide green sward, cut through by a straight man-made channel with grassy banks. The channel was half-filled with water, and I could see that it emptied into a nearby stream. I turned and walked up to the other end of the channel. There I found a cracked terracotta pipe sticking out of the bank, just above the water line. It was hissing and spitting and disgorging lumps of steaming half-molten cheese into the water. I shook my head, thinking how terrible it was that Whitcoulls couldn’t think of a more environmentally-friendly way of disposing of their books.

The end.